Fox News Trumpsters Not Very Supportive Of Trump’s Attacks On U.S. Intelligence Communities

Judging from these Fox hosts' faint support of Donald Trump’s attacks on United States intelligence agencies, his strategy of siding with Julian Assange over the U.S. is not going to work out well for him.

Fox’s Outnumbered show is a reliableTrumpcheerleadingsquad. So it’s notable to hear comments like this from the conservative cohosts about Russian hacking:

DAGEN MCDOWELL: He [Trump] needs to make the distinction, which is hard to do on Twitter, between the leadership and then those lifelong, those lifetime intelligence, the agents, the officers and the analysts who we will rely upon. But he needs to get to the bottom of this.

My concern is, the more Donald Trump disparages the intelligence community, he puts himself at odds with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill. That jeopardizes maybe the confirmation process of some of his nominees and also the all-important agenda from the Republicans.

Got that? McDowell doesn’t care that Trump may be endangering the safety of Americans with his disregard of our own intelligence community. She’s worried that it could hurt him politically. Nevertheless, her comments showed an obvious lack of support for Trump’s behavior.

FRANCIS: I hate to say it, I have to agree with Juan here. I mean, I think Donald Trump is the one who is conflating these ideas that if the Russians are behind it that then that means the Democrats are trying to delegitimize his election. I mean, I think if you listen carefully to the words that Clapper used when he was out there, he said no, they didn’t interfere with the voting boxes and we aren’t the ones that are in a position to say if this impacted the election. What he’s saying is that the intelligence officials aren’t the ones that would ever go out and try and quantify what impact this information had on the election. It was certainly one of the factors. […] It was one of a zillion things. It didn’t necessarily turn the election but … the non-stop Wikileaks did have an impact on people’s thinking.

Harris Trumper Faulkner pretended to sound neutral while promoting Trump’s viewpoint. But even she seemed a tad nervous about Trump’s behavior:

FAULKNER: It is true to say that we shouldn’t politicize it. I think we can say that. I don’t know that we can necessarily go further than that until we know everything that they’re learning in that meeting. We have every hope because these people have taken the oath to abide by the Constitution. They’re patriots in our country, these people collecting intelligence for the betterment of our national security. But you know, we had the same hope with the FBI staying politically clean, too, through James Comey and we saw him do some interesting political gymnastics over the summer for lack of a better word.

But I will say this, as we move forward. Donald Trump has a small window to kind of narrow down what he’s going to say about this and how to move forward. He does start to look at that process of his [national security] nominations being looked at next week … So the window is narrow for him to figure out, “OK, where do I fall here. How do I separate this?” It’s like the chaff from the wheat. You know the idea that we were hacked – because that’s big! It doesn’t matter who hacked us.

However, McDowell closed by saying that it helps Trump that he nominated former Senator Dan Coates to be director of national intelligence because he’s a “hawk” on Russia.

So, the cheering squad is still with Trump but they’re clearly not happy with him about this.

Shepherd Smith, to his credit was the first to say the emperor has no clothes. I gotta think that for a people that for almost nine decades has been all things anticommunist especially of the Russian flavor have got to be confused about this new found love for Russia.